A New Kind of Darkness
by Amber Penglass
Summary: Crossover with Riddick, oneshot. In the future, the Slayer awakens to find a quicksilver eyed man salvaging a Cryotube. The one that she's still sleeping in, actually.


**New Kind of Darkness**

**Amber Penglass**

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About ten years after defeating the First, her friends started to age noticably.

She didn't.

Buffy wondered, years after everything was dust, if that was in the handbook, too? Page 300 something, 'Oh, by the way, if not killed, Slayers are immortal.'

Made sense. Buffy remembered something from some scientifical collage class or another that the main reasons humans died was cellular decomposition. The human body couldn't heal, or replace, dying cells fast enough.

Well, Buffy had always been a quick healer… Sort of solved her cellular decomposition problem, didn't it, when her body was able to replace those dying cells as fast as they died? So Buffy kept living- but only in the beating heart, expanding lungs, brain wave sense. She still kicked dead ass, she kept mutilated alien ego, she went on shattering demonic plans and year after damn year she averted apocalypses side by side with armageddons.

She decided Spike was a liar. Once, he'd promised her that when she had that death wish that all Slayers inevitably had, he'd be there to fulfill that wish.

But he never came.

Buffy kept wishing, but he never came.

Nor did anyone else, for that matter, and it was getting damnably annoying.

Some random neo-government or other decided to pull an Initiative. Buffy woke up to find herself on the wrong side of plasteel bars –something that had been invented around 2150. She sat in the corner of the stark white room for what seemed like an eternity. She'd been in similar situations before; there was one difference this time, though- this time, she didn't intend to try to escape. Whatever they had planned for her, at least it would be something different from the seamless days and nights she'd endured for the past hundred or so years without…without everything or anything, really.

She blinked into the darkness.

Darkness.

Wasn't her calling, anymore. Plenty other 'Slayers.' Battling the dark that was everywhere wasn't much more than a hobby, really. Like cats. Like cats were to an old spinster- that was darkness, to her. Just company to an old, old lady who didn't have anyone or anything left to socialize with…

She didn't fight when they came to take her away, to strap her down –useless!- in another white room and fill it with gas. She didn't fight the odd sort of sleep that came over her- cold, she thought, penetrating. She could feel the sleepy coldness dig its icy fingers into her consciousness, piece by piece. First motor, then speech, then coherent thought, imagination, sensory… One by one, sections of her brain shut down. Her breathing slowed, and her heart rate nearly ceased to exist. Her thumb twitched. Her eyelids fluttered with the last flitter of eye movement.

But she was still awake.

And, she realized with an internal sigh, she'd stay awake. At least, the Slayer part of her would. But Buffy… Buffy slept.

Cryosleep, even in it experimental stages, it seemed, couldn't shut you down completely…at least, not the primal parts… And the Slayer was all primal.

She smiled in her sleep, but the doctors didn't see it as they placed her in a long glass and plasteel tube- one of the first Cryotubes. The glass iced over, a light clicked to green, and they shut the door to the cold room, leaving Buffy and the other hundred plus tubes, that she couldn't see and didn't care to, to rest.

* * *

First came hearing- not that there was anything to hear.

Second came sight- not that there was anything to see.

Third was the sensory- she flexed her fingers, and felt nothing but cold air.

Then came the smell.

And she smelled…

The Cryotubes slid open, and she opened her eyes.

"Good morning, sleeping beauty." But there was not true welcome in the whisky-rumble voice that greeted her ears. With the icy clarity of someone who's most primitive parts of her mind had lain awake for PTB knew how long, she looked at the single man that stood above her, and she smiled the smile of pure Slayer.

Buffy had decided not to wake up. But the Slayer had never been asleep in the first place…

The Slayer gazed up at the anomaly that stood before her. She smelled something overwhelmingly familiar about him, and it was making the animal in her growl.

She smelled Kendra.

She smelled Faith.

She smelled Kennedy, Claire, Vi, Charlotte.

She smelled Slayer, but a new breed of it.

The Slayer smiled, and stretched.

"That," she said. "Was a nice nap. Now, if you don't mind my asking, what kind of shit is the world in now? I need an ass to kick."

The big man tilted his head, quicksilver eyes glinting in the near pitch-black state of their surroundings.

"More like universe, not world," he responded. Slayer titled her head at that, slipping out over the side of the Cryotubes to stand on feet that hadn't been upright for a long, long time.

"Works for me," she said.

He said nothing; he moved past her to the end of her Cryotubes, and she noticed for the first time the heavy manacles wrapped around the length of the tube. The latte-skinned ox of a humanoid took up the heavy chains, and with big, heavy, deliberate steps he started dragging the whole thing towards the door that lay in shattered splinters.

She followed, not helping or offering to, ignoring the shattered remains of over a hundred Cryotubes all around her. They didn't matter to her, not anymore. The Slayer protected living innocents. These were dead and thus no longer her concern.

Buffy stirred, disturbed by the Slayer's callous uncaring for the unfortunate souls all around her, probably similarly captured Slayers –was Faith in here somewhere? - but not quite willing enough to wake up over it. Buffy stayed asleep, and a smile curled at the Slayer's lips.

There was a ship out in the hall. There was no ceiling, anymore, back out behind the ship. The trail of a controlled crash-landing was easily visible to her quickly contracting pupils as star and moonlight lanced through to her cornea. Beside the ship, like a dislodged parasite, laya cracked Cryotube, looking eons more advanced than her own.

Ah, so he had sustained damage to the craft, damagingtheCryotube in the process, managed a crash landing near an old Cryo experiment lab, set out to take a working Cryotube…nevermind anyone in it... The Slayer approved. It was what she would have done; she couldn't do her eternal duty if she were dead. Better one dead than the other she could save, eventually.

The man who smelled of a race of Slayers stopped by the small craft, climbing up into its gaping side to haul the Cryotube up after him. Hardly breathing hard he said, without looking at her, "Grab a tube, or don't. I ain't waitin'."

The Slayer's dark amusement was palpable on her tongue as she turned, re-entered the storage room, located one of the few remaining tubes with a green light, and opened it. The person inside it was old; the eyes that opened were rheumy and bloodshot, and the coughing that began instantly spoke to the Slayer of a rich, lonely old woman who had bought her ticket to the future in hopes of better, miraculous medicine to be found there.

With one hand the Slayer reached out, gripped that coughing throat, twisted…

The hacking stopped, and the Slayer hoisted out the dead woman who wouldn't have lived another few hours anyways out of her new tube, tossing her unceremoniously aside. The Slayer turned, located a length of twisted wires hanging from what remained of the ceiling. Tug, a shower of drywall and dirt, a brisk twist of the wires around the niches on the Cryotube.

It felt good, hauling the heavy 'tube out of what had once been a storage room. Exercise. The Slayer was itching for a good bout of anything physical.

Into the belly of the craft, hauling her own Cryotube behind her. A screech of a shove along the metal flooring, and the 'tube was alongside the alien man's. Without preamble she rearranged the claspings and chains on his tube to accommodate hers.

"Get your ass in a seat." The command, it came from the forward section of the dark craft. Whisky, rough. Rumbling, growling. Uncaring, indifferent. The Slayer smiled again, sliding into one of the sinister looking chairs of twisted metal and plasteel behind and to the right of him. She grabbed what passed for a buckle, uselessly clasping it around herself, and leaned her head back. A moment later, a rumbling purr slipped into the metal machine beneath her, and she felt with every inch of her Slayer-sense when they left the Earth completely. She also felt, with just as much of that sense, that there hadn't been much of Earth to leave behind.

Buffy remained resolutely asleep. She'd faced enough of reality. She refused to see any more of it. The Slayer laughed, inwardly, a building vibration in her chest. It faded, and she relaxed again- as much as any predator can relax in the presence of a fellow killer.

"We're being pursued," the Slayer murmured after a long while of silence.

"Wrong." A statement, nothing more. "I'm bein' pursued. You're just baggage."

"Baggage you offered a ride to."

"Baggage that'll slow down my pursuers when I need it to."

A pause.

"Ann."

"Hm."

"Call me Ann."

"Sweetness, I won't be knowin' you long enough to call you anythin'." Buttons were pushed, belts released, and the mountain of a creature moved silently between the seats to the back, prepping his Cryotube.

The Slayer smiled into the pitch blackness around her.

At last, a new breed of darkness…

**End.**

Rather pointless, admittedly. My first hand at angst that came directly from my brain. Most other angst I've done before was canon-inspired. I've just always wanted to try my hand at a Buffy/Riddick drabble. While this ended up being a big longer than a drabble, it's short for me. And no, there will be no continuations. I can't do the Riddick character adequately for my liking; he's a very precocious character to write, and it stresses my muses to do even something as short as this.

If you think Buffy is out of character, note that I stopped calling her Buffy, and started calling her the Slayer? That was done for a reason. Buffy the Slayer is tough but compassionate. The Slayer, pure Slayer, has no such hindrances. Remember when the First Slayer tried to kill Buffy's friends? Yeah, doubt the Slayer would have trouble killing a dying old lady for her own survival. If you disagree, oh well.

Hope you enjoyed!

_-Amber Penglass_


End file.
